APEC Seminar (Astronomy - Particle Physics - Experimental Physics - Cosmology)

Speaker: Andrew Fowlie (Monash U)
Title: Halo-independence with quantified maximum entropy at DAMA/LIBRA
Date (JST): Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 13:30 - 14:30
Place: Seminar Room A
Related File: 1943.pdf
Abstract: Using the DAMA/LIBRA anomaly as an example, we formalise the notion of halo-independence in the context of Bayesian statistics and quantified maximum entropy. We consider an infinite set of possible profiles, weighted by an entropic prior and constrained by a likelihood describing noisy measurements of modulated moments by DAMA/LIBRA. We find the most plausible dark matter (DM) profiles and predictions for unmodulated signal rates at DAMA/LIBRA. The entropic prior contains an a priori unknown regularisation factor, β, that describes the strength of our conviction that the profile is approximately Maxwellian. By varying β, we smoothly interpolate between a halo-independent and a halo-dependent analysis, thus exploring the impact of prior information about the DM profile.